Can superheroes work outside of the timeframe they were created in?
Can you "modernize" Superman, Spiderman, or Batman?
Or does doing that ruin the characters?
Is it like Dick Tracy or The Lone Ranger, where you need the timeframe for the concept to work?

Yes, of course they can be modernized and still be relevant or successful.
Proof: It's been done already.

>>213456407
What do you think separates something like Batman from something like Dick Tracy, in terms of timelessness?
Both have colorful villains and archetypal heroes in vibrant cities. Both come from comics made for young people.

>>213456220 (OP)
Heroes like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman were always depicted in a somewhat changing world across their comic runs, made contemporary with the times during which each issue was sold. Heroes such as The Lone Ranger and Dick Tracy are more or less frozen within certain time periods. The Lone Ranger was already an anachronism when he was created, and Dick Tracy, for some reason, never really got depicted past the mid-20th century.

>>213456431
Batman doesn't work in a post 9/11 world. His existence makes sense in 1980's New York

>>213456431
Dick Tracy relies on the fashion and the aesthetics of old noir crime stories. If you put him in modern times it simply appears anachronistic.
A weirdo dressed like a Batman happen in any time period.

>>213456477
In current times Batman should be focusing his efforts on corporate crime.

>>213456477
Christopher Nolan's movies addressed that quite well. He still fits into the present-day.

>>213456496
>dressed like a bat can happen
Is what I meant.

>>213456220 (OP)
Spiderman works in any time frame.

>>213456470
>>213456496
So the concepts differ in terms of outlandishness, in a sense?
Batman and Superman are so unnatural they aren't beholden to one age?
Whereas Dick Tracy is indebted to a certain style.

>>213456220 (OP)
Personally I prefer superman to be in the 50's and spider-man to be in the 80-90's, since I just feel like those time periods fit them better, but in general I don't think it's that big a deal. Hell there's Batman beyond which obviously takes place in the future, but still works with Terry

>>213456515
Depending on how effective you want him to be.

>>213456220 (OP)
Superman is a 40s hero and hates blacks and jews.

>>213456592
You have a good point about Dick Tracy being indebted to the noir style popular during the mid-20th century. For Superman and Batman, I was thinking it has more to do with the fact that comics kept being made of them depicted during contemporary settings. Superman and Batman kept living and working into the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and to the 2020s now. To my knowledge, we don't see that with The Lone Ranger or Dick Tracy, though I could be wrong. I just see them as very stereotypically 19th and 20th century characters.

>>213456775
That makes sense. It really doesn't matter if they should be or not, because they were.
There are modern Lone Ranger and Dick Tracy comics, but they're kept in the same timeframe.
The colors are a little more diluted and the tone is a bit more serious, but it's still the 1880s and 1930s.

there should be more stories about Jesus fitting in with modern reality and doing modern miracles and stuff and fixing shit like slop & brainrot.
I'd like to see that superhero...

>>213456829
Sometimes they'll do this with pulp heroes

>>213456859
There's a whole genre of greek gods doing that

>>213456220 (OP)
What you talking about! They are modernized! You see Clark Kent dressed like that now? You see him jumping into telephone booths? If anything, I’d love a Golden Age Superman movie that takes places in the ‘30s

>>213456829
Apparently, they let Dick Tracy go into the 1970s, possibly even later, though the creator of the series died in the 1980s.

>>213456592
>Batman and Superman are so unnatural they aren't beholden to one age?
Superman since he is an alien will always have an element of Sci-Fi in his stories.

you can't modernize them realistically because some fag with a phone would expose their identity day 1

>>213456981
This why people that want muh realism and muh dark and gritty capeshit movies are hilarious. More realistic environment you put these characters in the more retarded and assured they become. The Dark Knight worked only because of The Joker, Batman was the worst part of the movie. Rises is such a meme because how serious they took it yet the entire story and everything is retarded. Like the whole CIA guy meme

>>213456220 (OP)

The Lone Ranger is pretty specific to the wild west period but then Captain America was a WWII creation and is still one of the most popular characters.

>>213457112

>>213456220 (OP)
Batmsn has already been modernised. Look at TDK. It's a very 2000s movie in an awesome way.

>>213457222
TDK setting sucks. It’s boring as hell. Batman is supposed to be in a surreal environment. Finger always had giant moon and huge clocks giant penny and weird shit in the Golden Age Batman. Got almost psychedelic in Silver Age. Then the whole muh realism and edgelord shit

>>213456220 (OP)
Batman and Spiderman managed to escape that curse. Superman has to be chained to his lame ass 40's human life and it be the focal point of 99% of his stories.

>>213456592
Working at a newspaper hasn't exactly aged well for Clark Kent and the farmboy who doesn't understand modern tech doesn't either since farmers these days use more high tech than most urbanites.

>>213456885
Setting the Batman animated series in that time turned out to be a bad idea, though.

>>213457546
Eventually we’re going to have Clark working as a podcaster

>>213456220 (OP)
You can do anything. but is it cringe? Quite possibly

>>213457577
BTAS was influenced by Burton’s Batman movies which was art deco. Blending modern with ‘30s style. It works. You see at the time modern cars by still they still wear fedoras and use Tommy guns. There is still TV when that didn’t exist in the ‘30s and helicopters and shit

>>213457658
>BTAS
>You see at the time modern cars
No, I am talking about the reboot BCC they released last year, though, the one set in the 40s, BTAS was great, but the reboot set in the 40s didn't live up to the potential.

The only good Batman modernization is Matt Reeves because he made the real world recognizable while being exaggerated.
It's a grungy angsty world for teens that plays with noir.

>>213457733
Is that one with female Penguin?

>>213457735
It’s still the most boring uninspired take. Gotham has to be surreal where a guy made out of clay and crocodile man and grown man dressing by up as bat will fit in. You know if Reeves did Killer Croc it’ll just be a thug on a rubber crocodile mask

>>213457752
Yes.

>>213457735
this

>>213457794
I would think it would be a thug with that A Different Guy disease.

>>213457794
That would be Nolan's take.
Reeves would have it be a skin condition, like in the comics.

>>213456220 (OP)
Super-heroes can work in any timeframe provided that the author remembers that super-hero fiction is equal parts a gunslinger story (cowboys defending the west from evil), a fairy tale (knights saving people), and an adventure (people going to places and doing cool things). As long as you keep these elements alive and evoke the tone, creative influences, and emotions of the source material, you can do anything you want with Superman and Batman or The Shadow or Hulk.

Hellsing may not be literally close to The Shadow or The Spider, but it's the damnest best adaptation of the pulps in spirit.

>>213457406
>TDK setting sucks. It’s boring as hell. Batman is supposed to be in a surreal environment.
No, lol. Just look at Adam West Batman. You don't need weird architecture to make Batman work.
>Then the whole muh realism and edgelord shit.
You must be 12 if you think TDK is edgelord.

>>213456220 (OP)
Cavill, Garfield/Holland, Batfleck/Battison all prove you can. But yeah some heroes just have to stay in their time period. For example the X-Men.

>>213458057
X-men's time period spans pretty much all of space and time, though.

>>213457112
Captain America being thrust into our time and disenchanted with the 21st Century is a great example of modernization.

>>213456407
This. What a dumb thread.
>>213458057
>For example the X-Men.
X-Men's problem is that prime era Chris Claremont couldn't write the comic forever.

>>213459481
That was interesting.

>>213457406
Gardner Fox wrote the Batman story in the issue you posted. If you want to pretend to care about old-school Batman please know what you are talking about fag.

>>213457546
Not understanding tech has never been a character trait of Superman retard

>>213459481
that was captain america being thrust into our time and still believing what he believed originally and knowing it was no longer connected to a nation, but he still fought for it.

>>213460234
It was a character trait of Clark Kent, though, as he regularly used his farm boy upbringing to play coy and pretend like he didn't understand what was going on since he was just some naive hick from smallville.

>>213456220 (OP)
No, though retards like >>213456407 think they can because of all the cringe capeshit we've been flooded with the last 2 decades. Note how all capeshit now just have to take place on alternate earths where most people don't have smart phones, cctv and satellite imaging and drones don't exist to monitor super heroes and where they're coming from or where they're going, where there aren't the thousands or tens of thousands of people who would cultishly track super heroes day and night to uncover their identities, where no contemporary social problems or societal trends happen and most criminals are multicultural bank robbers or purse snatchers and no Floyd/LA riots ever happen and no meth head is robbing a gas station and setting the clerk on fire. There's no commentary on the collapsing trust people have in their governments, no plotlines about how Superman would be forced to side with the people or the government when it comes to Epstein or 2008 style scandals, no plot about Bruce Wayne or Stark refusing to supply the MIC with weapons that they will send to Israel to blast kids with.

No, capeshit set in "current times" has nothing to do with the reality of the world today or what people are like. In capeshit settings the technology may have advanced but people still think and act like people in the 1930s and 40s did. It's archaic and out of touch to an infantile degree. Even the whole costume aspect of capeshit is barely held onto anymore, with every hero's costume getting updated to look like power armor with extremely dull colors or shelved altogether because of how ridiculous the concepts of costumes are.

>>213456220 (OP)
Superman is the "man of tomorrow" so he's inherently one step ahead, and his mere technology like the fortress of solitude is still out of our grasp despite being through up so long ago.
Batman is easy to adapt to a future setting too. Beyond is a thing, and the new Absolute Batman was born in 2003 or some shit.
Dick Tracy is a bit dated in terms of aesthetics but it doesn't mean you can't dress retro in the future.

>>213460560
>Note how all capeshit now just have to take place on alternate earths where most people don't have smart phones, cctv and satellite imaging and drones don't exist to monitor super heroes and where they're coming from
don't recall such a thing

>>213460560
That is not true at all, they come up with secret societies and government agencies like S.H.I.E.L.D. who use those technologies to monitor superheroes and do men in black type shit, I am pretty sure many of those technologies actually existed in comic books before they even actually existed for real and many alternate universes incorporate tech like fusion that isn't even available to us yet, in the batman movie, he specifically commandeer smart phones to track the whole population.

>>213456220 (OP)
You mean like if instead of being in the Vietnam War making a transistor powered suit of armour out of a box of scraps, Tony Stark was in Afghanistan making an arc reactor powered suit of armour out of a different box of scraps?

I just called Jon Favreau and he said no, it's just not possible.

Dude you could make ANYTHING work, the same way they retell and modernise Greek mythology, Shakespeare or Don fucking Quixote. Shit that is centuries or millennia old.

There's nothing 'special' about 'muh capeshit' unless you're one of the fucktards that are still buying into the 1950's 'Seduction of the Innocent' anti-comic horsecrap in some way. And Superman and a lot of other heroes are just moderised versions of older shit themselves.

It's all about whether you can make it cool. Marvel hereoes were cool, and then the M-She-U faggotry made them 'uncool' But you could make Flash fucking Gordon cool again.

How many faggots to this day actually believe The Rocketeer is based on some actual old IP, and he's cool as shit.

PROTIP: Not everything has to be set in the CURRENT YEAR either.

>>213456727
Superman was used to fight the KKK with radio propaganda.Look it up.

>>213456727
So the jews who came up with superman were self-loathing jews who made sure that only other self-loathing jews get to manage the estate and superman IP?

I think Smallville was a great example of character modernization for a new generation.

>>213460495
Give me an issue number

Almost every superhero movie is modernized. They rarely do period pieces.
Incidentally I'd love a Superman movie actually set in 1938, but you know current year Hollywood is incapable of depicting that timeframe correctly.

>>213456883
i don't give a shit about lesser gods. Zeus and Odin et al should bow before mankind.
I want to see a human god fix our human made problems. It would be prudent if the gods/daemons want to help us (else face nihilistic annihilation). They should prove their relevance to us, now.

>>213456220 (OP)
"Superheroes" are made for 10 year old kids. Why are you discussing this retarded shit while being an adult?

Ironically, the best depiction of superheroes in the modern world is The Boys comic. You can try to insert this shucksy and naive atmosphere but shit like that hasn't had a firm grasp in the real-life culture since at least the 1950s. To a degree, modern superhero media is a nostalgic attempt for the viewer to pretend they don't live in the age of cynicism and excessive self-consciousness.

>>213456859
There was a recent tv series about messiah doing miracles in modern day and nobody understanding if he is real of fake. Also Israel was very angry and wanted to capture him.

That’s what Man of Steel was all about

>>213456220 (OP)
The Dark Knight is considered the greatest Batman and even greatest comic book movie of all time and last i checked its not set in 1940

>>213464022
found it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(American_TV_series)

>>213456515
The problem with that is Batmans Rogues gallery doesnt have any CEOs like lex luthor it king pin to fight

>>213456220 (OP)
A superhero story isn't modern unless their identity has already been revealed by a group of obsessive autists less than a month after the hero became a public figure.

>>213456220 (OP)
Batman, Superman, etc. have all been set in the current year for like 80 years
most superhero characters are like that; they're "setting-agnostic", in that you could put them basically anywhere, any time, and they would still work fine
there are rare exceptions that are more tied to their setting (like Watchmen in the 80s, or Worm in the early 2010s) but these are usually characters created for self-contained stories, not forever-serialization like most big superheroes are

>>213456220 (OP)
Sometimes.
>>213456431
Batman’s origin was reworked to fit the grimdark 80s which was a peak of violence that made it very close to the noir that inspired early “serious” takes (originally Batman wasn’t a serious character at all, no cartoon was, the canon was a gradual development).

The 80s and 90s were the peak of comics trying to create a serious universe and canon, as well as appeal to a more adult audience.

>>213456496
You could have made revivals of The Shadow and others, nothing is that time locked about them compared to capeshitters, there were just more people interested in capeshit. Same reason Lucas and Spielberg could rape the films of their youth and their parents without contemporary audiences really stopping to think about that shit being WWII era schlock.

>>213456885
>see him jumping into telephone booths
That was never a key character trait. However, Clark Kent being a journalist and Peter Parker a photographer for a newspaper is basically unworkable now. Journalism doesn’t exist and blogging or other “updated” versions of these traits look gay and phoney.
A true update for Spiderman would be a twitch streamer or something. Clark Kent could lean into the dying days of journalism perhaps (last newspaper, only guy who can find a story). Otherwise there’s not much. Codemonkey or advertising guy?

A lot of the old standby roles are dying off as we speak. Tony Stark type characters or Green Arrow became more believable. Bruce as well. Out of touch billionaires who want to punch purse snatchers in the face in their spare time.

Similarly the goofy shit has mostly been cut. The super intelligent apes in every 80s comic are gone (they had to cut them from the latest Superman). Mr Fantastic doesn’t stretch 1000 times around Galactus legs to trip him.

>>213464611
>However, Clark Kent being a journalist and Peter Parker a photographer for a newspaper is basically unworkable now.
I imagine someone at some point has floated the idea of Clark writing a substack pedaling zionist messaging, maybe a news aggregating twitter account. Peter would be one of those "professional" clippers for eceleb streams. That sounds terminally online but the illusion of journalism being anything more than propaganda has come irreparably crumbling down, more so for each younger age group.

>>213464063
thanks anon.
that does seem interesting. I'll take a look.
>netflix
...with caution

>>213457794
meh the fantastic Batman villains are the most retarded ones. he works best when fighting gangsters/terrorists.

>>213458057
What exactly is the X-Men time period according to you? They fit best in a futuristic setting.

>>213456220 (OP)
the only realistic portrayal of superheroes is either
>superheroes get gunned down by government and killed
>superheroes kill the governments and take over the world

anything besides that is not realistic.

>>213456220 (OP)
They've already been ruined a hundred times over. You're chewing on ground up plastic toys

>>213460560
>no Floyd/LA riots ever happen and no meth head is robbing a gas station and setting the clerk on fire. There's no commentary on the collapsing trust people have in their governments, no plotlines about how Superman would be forced to side with the people or the government when it comes to Epstein or 2008 style scandals, no plot about Bruce Wayne or Stark refusing to supply the MIC with weapons that they will send to Israel to blast kids with.
I think you’re retarded for suggesting capeshit has to be about muh current topic and whatever fake outrage news you’re being fed by some e-celeb grifter, but they do this all the time. A Superman movie came out last month which is about the Israel/Palestine conflict the villain is an Elon Musk type figure.

>>213456220 (OP)
Yes? What the fuck?
>Spiderman is a college student/recent grad, PS4 game has him using Twitter to get live updates on social opinion
>Batman uses tech and gadgets, only expands the believability with time (especially the big brother network created in Dark Knight trilogy)
>Superman is powerful regardless of time, only thing that takes a hit is his job in print journalism which has been fazed out

>>213464025
Sure but it was shit and it failed, thereby proving you can’t modernize Superman.

>>213456220 (OP)
The first memorable version of Spider-Man that wasn't the comic came nearly THIRTY years later.

>>213466842
>Black Mask, Penguin, Ventriloquist, and Two-Face are better than Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy or Man-bat